Patricia Maginnis, pioneering abortion-rights activist, dies

Maginnis, whom many consider the first abortion-rights activist in the United States, helped shift the debate in the era before Roe v. Wade away from the rules governing abortion providers to the right of women to control their bodies.

As Texas and other states pass or are considering laws drastically curtailing most abortions, her life is a reminder of the single-minded commitment it took to help secure the right to abortion, and of what women faced before the procedure was legalized.

“After all she went through, including risking going to prison, she couldn’t have imagined this kind of rollback,” Elana Bloom, Maginnis’ grandniece, said in a phone interview.

Maginnis “may not loom as large as a Margaret Sanger or a Betty Friedan” in feminist history, Lili Loofbourow wrote in Slate magazine in 2018, in the definitive profile of Maginnis.

“And yet,” she added, “a decade before Roe, with her ungainly activism, her proclivity for wearing clothes she’d found on the street and her righteous, unquenchable rage, Maginnis helped to fundamentally reshape the abortion debate into the terms we’re still using today.”

She founded the Citizens Committee for Humane Abortion Laws, which called for women’s right to safe and legal elective abortions, in San Francisco in 1962. The committee, which later changed its name to the Society for Humane Abortion, sponsored symposiums to educate medical and legal professionals and operated a free post-abortion clinic.

A few years later Maginnis, along with two colleagues, Lana Phelan Kahn and Rowena Gurner, formed the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (ARAL), the precursor to NARAL Pro-Choice America, now one of the nation’s major abortion-rights advocacy organizations, which was founded in 1969.

The women became known as the “Army of Three” as they conducted a systematic civil disobedience campaign at a time when even mailing literature about birth control was illegal. They led classes in how to conduct do-it-yourself abortions and coordinated what they called an “underground railroad” of information, which provided, among other things, a continually updated list of qualified abortion providers in Mexico, Japan and Sweden.

In violation of local and state laws that prohibited telling women where they could “procure a miscarriage,” they also distributed leaflets on the streets of San Francisco doing just that and urging women to attend their do-it-yourself abortion classes.

“I am attempting to show women an alternative to knitting needles, coat hangers and household cleaning agents,” Maginnis told reporters in 1966.

The Army of Three flagrantly violated the law not only to help educate women but also so they could be arrested and test anti-abortion ordinances. Maginnis and Gurner were arrested in San Francisco in 1967 and convicted of unlawfully advertising abortion, but in 1973 a California appeals court overturned their convictions as unconstitutional, rendering the ordinances invalid.

Maginnis, who grew up in a strict Roman Catholic family in Oklahoma, told Slate that she couldn’t specify the moment she became an activist. Rather, she said, she seemed to reach the boiling point after a long, slow buildup of rage — after she tended to women with botched abortions at an Army hospital; after she saw how powerless women were in the face of bureaucratic medical protocols; after she saw the wide disparities in how poor women and women of color were treated compared with women of means; and after she had three abortions herself, one performed in Mexico and two that were self-induced.

Regardless of when her activism began, her agenda of repealing all abortion laws and teaching women to self-induce seemed so far out of the mainstream that some in the news media treated her with derision. A New York Times article in 1966 about her abortion classes said she had “the eyes of a zealot” and identified her, at 38, as a “spinster.”

Alternative newspapers called her “the Che Guevara of abortion reformers,” a reference to the guerrilla strategist of the Cuban revolution. Her ideas certainly went beyond the calls for incremental reform made by establishment groups like Planned Parenthood.

Bloom, her grandniece, said there were several reasons Maginnis was not embraced by the mainstream. “She was teaching women how to give themselves abortions,” she noted, “which, even by today’s standards, is pretty radical.”

Beyond that, she said, Maginnis was not a self-promoter. “She was just trying to legalize abortion at any cost.”